I think it caters to young males and relates to the level of testosterone. In movies like The Expendables they're all action stars in their 60's, 70's & 80's. It's silly because they poke fun at that fact.
Bond super villain generic bad guys were always nondescript, usually with matching jump suits, helmets or whatever. Kill all of them you want and it never really looks too bad. If you go back and look at an old episode of the A-team where they are shooting up a bazillion rounds of ammo and blowing stuff up, nobody really seems to get killed or even hurt. BTW - in the books Q took away his 'ladies gun' of a Beretta tip-up .25 and have him a PPK in .32 that 'hits like a brick.' Now a character needs a high capacity something with an endless supply of magazines and be a martial arts expert.
A recent trend has been to dehumanize the enemy to increase the violence - put them in some sort of ninja swaddling and obscure the fact they are actually people. Worked great in Star Wars, right? Identical stormtroopers with identical and apparently utterly ineffective and pointless body armor. But now we have John Wick blowing people's brains out at close range and hell, even Rambo has become even more hellishly bloody and violent than I care for. In that 2008 movie he was chopping people into incredibly graphic bloody chunks with a big Ma Deuce that even turned my stomach. Compare that to
First Blood - same character but not quite the same thing.
Keanu Reeves can actually shoot. He shoots IDPA and three-gun style matches and is absolutely shit-hot doing so. When you watch him reload, cycle a slide, the way he hold the guns - that's real. For competition, but real. I used to shoot in some things like that and we had an informal league similar to it I shot in for years. You get guys that are masters of the paper game. But we sometime used to shoot mano a mano where the final target was a wee balloon bobbing around on a string. I've seen experts empty their magazines to no effect because they are great at the game but throw in an outlier and they choke.